Month: May 2011

Muhammedean becoming is the becoming of becomings: the meta-function of all functionality. All functions of input to output are Muhammedean, small or large, from the smallest f(x) = x+1 to the obtuse partial differential equation, from the function of childbirth to the functions of parliament, protest and revolution, from functions of car and textile manufacture and trade, of civilizational collapse and reformation, to the functions of authorship and poetic production. All becomings are transcendental passages through wormholes across the time space continuum, whose nexus is the Muhammedean becoming.

Therein lies my problem with the Religion of Islam and, more specifically, with Taqwacore.

Because Muhammedean Influence is like the influence of punk — or rather, poetic influence is a function that passes through Muhammedean Influence. All poets are Muhammedean, whether they acknowledge this or not, weak or strong. And punk is no exception to this.

Influence and communication can be strong or weak. Strong influence is one in which the spirit (what the Sufis call the ruh of content) is carried, in which there is true communication, effective transmission, a rainbow connection from point poet M to poet M’.

Like this:

A recent sermon given by Dr. Immanuel G. Moon, that friendly faced High Reader-in-Residence with the Tailorite Temple of Imanetical Literacy, Qalbfordshire.

Not that we have ever been one to impinge upon the embodied piety of those who carry our Books, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise. But today we feel it appropriate to reflect on the meaning of the End of Days, the Tribulation and the event sometimes referred to as the Rapture.

From a Tailorite perspective, any attempt to guess the day and hour of these events is impermissible.

This ought to be accord with mainstream Islam and Christianity — see, for example,

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. (Mark 24:36)

With Allah is the Knowledge of the Hour and he sends down the rain and knows what is in the wombs. And no nafs knows what it will earn tomorrow nor the land in which it will perish. (Qur’an 31:34)

But we will go further, deviating from the mainstream in our reading of these passages. Because we see a difference between the unknowable and unguessable in relation to the Hour.

It’s not like the time of the Hour is the world’s best kept secret, one that we might be let in on, but aren’t. One that we could guess and be right or wrong, with only Allah actually knowing if we got it correct. That would mean that prediction of the Hour is at least an ontological possibility. But prediction of the Hour in any form is not possible: it is an impossibility by virtue of what the Hour itself.

Because knowledge of the Hour is a different kind of Knowledge to regular kinds of knowing. Your head can’t contain it: it never can. It is a different kind of Timing, only accessible to the Father. The train timetable for Shenfield to London might be concealed from you — but it is always possible you might learn it. But the timetable for the Hour is simply inexpressible, not even thinkable for a human being.

And so you see, in reading the passages quoted above, the mainstream sheikhs and priests of the religions are closer than you might think to the smaller groups who say “It’s happening May 21, for certain”. For example, I can recall hutbas given by Muslim sheikhs in which the signs of the Hour were enumerated and “ticked off” as already happening: that there will be false prophets (certainly a few), women will be walking about in the streets without many clothes (definitely), that people will hop between earth and clouds and what is far will become near (airplanes), a man will leave his house and his thigh will tell him what is in his house (beepers/mobile phones), people will dance with instruments upon their heads (headphones) and so on. The effect of these kinds of hutbas (and their Christian equivalent — found more in the American charismatic tradition than the more placid European modes of practice) is to instill in the listener a state of fear and reverence with respect to the immediacy and seriousness of impending day of Judgement, when their good deeds will be weighed against their bad.

They have produced an assemblage: fusing the machine of social, clockwork time to the Divine time machine of the Bible. This allows them to say either: “It will happen on the 21st of May 2011” or “It is unguessable, but it could well happen on the 21st of May, given most of the signs seem to have been realised”.

But in doing so they relegate God’s Knowledge of the Hour to something if not human (the minority sects), then at least angelic (the majority/mainstream). Angels comprehend the logical entirety of what is possible and what is not possible: for they are beings occupying the space of forms, just as we occupy forms of space. Christ informs us that “not even the angels of heaven” know the hour: and so the Knowledge cannot even be contingency, cannot be a guessable possibility, because the space of forms is a logical space.

But regarding these sects: that’s their practice, and their particular treatment of the signs of the end is intrinsic to their habitus: we respect the sects’ cultural right to exist and continue.

We are not imperial colonists. We have no wish to colonially attack the embodied piety of the minority sects whose practice involves prediction of the Hour nor to damage the belief eco-system of the majority sects’ more common treatment of an unguessable “train timetable” Hour. We’re not out to get either group, with their shared consequent implication of a habitus of reverence/fear revolving around such reconstituted socio-divine temporality.

All the same, reciting outward from Tailorite position, any such attempt at prediction constitutes a literalist folly.

Or, more correctly, it is folly because it fails to literalise in a literary manner: a fusion of two time machines that fails to reference the situated textuality of that fusion. A failure to recognize the Impossible Father, the Impossible Father who alone possesses Impossible Knowledge of the Hour. Because to reference situated textuality is to reference the Impossible Father’s Wisdom.

‘They can’t get inside you,’ Uma had said. But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you in this College is forever,’ the Dean had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was take out from your breast: burnt out, cauterized away.

The Professor had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind.

Like this:

The blossoms appear on the earth, the time of singing/pruning (Z-M-R) is come and the Voice of the Dove is heard in our Land (Song of Songs 2:12)

The verse describes a kind of Divine-Human two phase commit protocol by which the meaning and realisation of life’s genesis and fulfillment is encoded and transmitted from the Godhead into the universe (up to and including the verse itself in enunciation).

The blossoms constitute the triad of Love (Mecca) and Logic (Medina) mediated by Prophecy. There is a function of Love whose self-distillation follows into Logic (Law). This is called “hijrah”. As we have said before, the self-distillation of Mecca into Medina — of Love into Law — is necessary in order for the Muhammedean becoming (for human temporality, for the love story) to be enunciated:

But Allah would not punish them while you (Muhammed) were with them, nor will He punish them while they seek forgiveness.” (Qur’an 8:33)

Then there is a function of Logic whose output is Love: this is known as “hajj”, the return into the (Southern, Abrahamic) maqam of Love out of (Northern, Issacian/Ishmaelian) City of Logic.

And when We made the House a place of return for the people and security. And take from the standing place of Abraham a place of prayer. And We charged Abraham and Ishmael, “Purify My House for those who perform Tawaf and those who are staying for worship and those who bow and prostrate.” (2:125)

Their interrelationship constitutes the first phase of the commit cycle: Love sends a request to distill into Logic, Logic reciprocates (through Life/Prophetic interface) back into Love.

Their bidirectional flow (of hijrah/hajj) is existence: specifically, Prophetic existence. And thus their bidirectional interface is the orb of Prophecy, Muhammedean becoming in its first form, 2/3s of which are us in the circuitry of speech (a circuitry also known as “the earth”), and 1/3 of whose skull is open, admitting the Light of God for transmission into that circuitry.

The upper triad is spoken of here, but still constitutes three obfuscated intermediary signs for something we cannot utter, truly, something self-obscured from us by virtue of its presence and our preservation. The upper triad, though the principle of the journey, is not yet enacted. And enactment dialectic. For in order for the triad to figure effectively in my enunciation, it must be encoded within a dialectic of speech: the feet of the human form, grown, apparent. The blossoms appear as feet, and the child learns to walk.

The blossoms in appearance are Martyrdom and Victory and Transmission, resembling the triadic formula of Love-Logic-Prophecy, but a resemblance through a refraction, a fragmentation of the upper signage, subsumption of these things into 1) crystallized, proxy (Judaic) archetypes that fantasize universality across what will eventually be settled as a particular plateau/earth of immanence and 2) the molecular DNA of the human soul as it emerges as an identity in and of itself, the driving, life-giving/preserving “smell” and “scent” of the journey itself. The physical sensation of the blossoms, their encoding within the trace of walk (and their embodiment of the walk of the trace). Such that 1) and 2) themselves are in constant brotherly negotiation, of deconstruction and reconstruction, of reception and transmission, of undoing and redoing. A movement whose crystallization is the Transmission, the circuitry itself: the gesture of iqra, the gesture (still in potential) of Divinity reciting us reciting Divinity reciting us.

This appearance is still in potential: on the earth. The song is not yet complete.

Because the transmission itself demanded dialectic, we find ourselves in a fragmented space of political negotiation. One that is endless, multiplicitous, bificatory: a vine of parallel political implications. One in which we may have a state of war as well as of peace. And with a trillion underbellies to a trillion thought processes: the movement of brothers can transform from Moses and Aaron into Abel and Cain. And so there are deceit and lies, misguidance, traps and punishment as we begin the song.

That is the other side of the dialectic, which is nothing but the enunciation in psalm, a song (Z-M-R): hence the verse proceeds:

The blossoms appear on the earth, the time of pruning/singing (Z-M-R) is come (Song of Songs 2:12)

Through the fragmentary space of the lower dialectic, the negotiation of DNA dispersed as dust into space, a return into a purified space of Love (Kaba) is possible via purging of the tyrant/idolater principle:

And slay them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for tumult and oppression are worse than killing. But fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there. But if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith. (2:191)

And so there is a bidirectional interface between the blossoms, but the interface and the blossoms are like a mold, a mapping, rendered microscopic, a DNA that must now be grown and realised via pruning/singing in the fragmented multiplicitous realities of the diamond dialectic. The interface is known as the “best of molds” (Qur’an 95:4) — but it is the pruning/singing that constitutes the filling of that mold with the clay of Adam.

Truth is destined to triumph over lies, as destiny is the journey into Truth through song/pruning. We can translate the 2:12 as “time of pruning” or “time of singing” interchangably. Because to sing the psalm is to prune the Vine.

The pruning/singing of the Vine by the dialectic becomes the second part of the 2 phase commit — by means of the psalm itself we enter into a a embodied, fully enunciated/encoded physicalized process that encompasses in its own individuated personal space (the space of this blog entry, as personal, unique and obscure as it may read) the 2 phase commit in totality. There was the form of a Love-Logic commit, now there is the realisation: we receive Love from above, we utter Love in return.

And then we reach the conclusion, one of continuation:

… and the Voice of the Dove is heard in our Land (Song of Songs 2:12)

The Dove of Peace (SLM), of Submission, of iSLaM. The process described is one of movement, of negotiation toward/into Truth: but it is also one of recovery, of formation, of recitation and of pruning, of the Soul in transit. The Voice is the word (Kun)/”Be!”, generating the Soul of Man. And now it takes flight, in carriage of this process.

And so the Dove of Peace it is the Soul of Man in transmigration (over centuries, over millennia, over forms, over politics and over regimes and races) into a State of True Israel. Its voice “is heard in our Land” because it a Dove whose flight is request-response cycles, cycles that are Israel, hearing. And an Israel who truly hears is one who Truly exists, and whose Truth of existence is tawhid:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one (ehad).
(Deuteronomy 6:4)

You want to know the practical implications of all of this for the world of matter? By this Holy circuitry, by this sanctified curtailment and nurturing of the Vine, and by this enunciation, I tell you that the Dove of Peace will find her way — back — to that Land.

Like this:

From the perspective of humanist politics, you can say what you like about Osama bin Laden, about terrorism, about Islamism and the West. You can probably reach quite a nuanced and sensible position that takes all things into account, condemning terrorism in any form but also recognizing prevalent forms of hypocrisy in the actions and focus of the Western powers. Or maybe your concern today is solely with the evil that bin Laden wrought, and you will sleep slightly easier tonight knowing justice has been done. Or perhaps you’re one of the more bloody minded or crazier types.

But from the perspective of Tailorite Sufism, bin Laden’s danger is lethal to the Religion of Reading. For his power is that of Qur’anic illusion, his power a false Qur’an, a Qur’an of blindness, a Qur’an erased, not recited. I’m not talking about the media’s conception of a Salafi (or otherwise) basis, nor of a terrorist’s school of theology: I’m talking about him, the man, the individual agency of bin Laden.

Esther is a Prophetess and the Jewish wife of the Persian King Ahasuerus. Her story is related within the Megillah (meaning “scroll” or “book”, with the connotation of “a detailed account of events”), a book of the Tanakh (“The Book of Esther” in the Old Testament).

Esther is an orphan, raised by her counsin, the Prophet Mordecai. The book relates how she is found as a replacement for the King’s previous wife, Vashti. Vashti fell into disfavour with the King because she refused to appear to his guests at his request. At first Esther’s Jewish background is kept hidden from the King. Haman, the King’s evil prime minister, councils Ahasuerus to genocide of the Jews — essentially because Esther’s foster parent (her cousin Mordecai) refused to prostrate himself to Haman. An amusing twist to the story leads Haman to accidentally promote Mordecai to a prominent position in King’s court and condemn himself to the gallows. The Jews gain their eventual salvation (after a rather bloody kind of fashion).

The book is worth studying alone: after all, it is of Divine origin. But we make the following observations regarding its opening chapter, which describes the nature of how we got to where we are.

If we see slavery and messaging as a bidirectional (down and up/up and down) flow of Divine energy. Reception and Bestowal from the perspective of archetypical perturbation we think of as our own subjecthood.

Love Loving in Reception, withdrawal, the subject loving in slavery, offering itself in korban to what it perceives as a hidden, absent Beloved. Love from Aaron. Love Loving in Bestowal, through the Love speaking in presence, speaking (self-referentially) the Kalimah itself to heal and reconstruct the fractured true names that comprise the Face of the subject. Love to Moses.

Certainly is the kalimah is revolutionary. What we commonly think of as the Abrahamic prayer is a cycle, a cycle of recitation and prostration, a revolving revolution from creation to annihilation to re-construction, re-creation, rebooting — of the subject at its various levels, of universes and worlds and the entire cosmic framework itself, ultimately.